You could almost see the cobwebs in the unused wheel spokes. I suppose they are really there for tourists, but the image seems symbolic to me.

China, once the capital of the bike, is now becoming one of the world's largest car countries. At a time of rising oil prices and climate change, you have to wonder about that.

It is predicted that by around 2020, China will have 140 million cars clogging its roads and further sullying the air. Most are private vehicles owned by China's burgeoning middle classes - 80 percent of the cars in Beijing are privately owned. China is now the third- largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world.

Recently Beijing authorities announced they will not restrict private car use in the capital, despite calls that there should be limits on use, or at least some kind of levy paid by private cars using public roadways in congested city precincts.

Bikes, on the other hand, are being sidelined -quite literally. Bike lanes in many of the major cities have been narrowed or have even disappeared altogether to be usurped by parked cars or used as bus lanes.

The declining number of bicycles in Beijing and the rising number of cars are rapidly converging. Many of those bicycles that are still counted lie rusting and unused in hutong courtyards or are left abandoned in the bowels of apartment complexes.

It is a picture of modern China. Those days of hundreds of cyclists, perhaps 20 or 30 deep, jostling at the traffic lights at large city intersections, for so long a globally recognizable image of China, are largely gone.

The acquiescence of the Communist Party authorities in the decline of bicycle use is important. It doubly underlines the belief that the party bureaucrats are more interested in staying in power than they are in truly sustainable development.

With widespread and entrenched urban bicycle use, the basis for both keeping greenhouse gas emissions in check and for decreasing reliance on fuel imports was presented to China on a plate. As recently as 2002, every 100 households owned 143 bikes.

Yet, the party authorities knew that to restrict car ownership, or even car use, at a time when so much money is sloshing about would have been political suicide. Bikes had to be allowed to become, as they are now, more or less the transport of choice for rural peasants and not much more. This can be seen as counterintuitive and possibly counterproductive, because China's reliance on foreign fuel imports is as politically flammable as the commodity itself is literally flammable.

The recent oil-price hike, and the outcry as the repercussions unroll, only confirm this.

China had the opportunity to control car use and, via a continued role for pedal power, promote a greener development of China's economy. Things do move faster in a modern economy, and China's two-wheeled economy could not last.

But there is still scope for less car use and more bikes even in big cities, a point that many in modern Western cities - express couriers for example - have rediscovered.

The Chinese authorities do not hesitate to throw their weight around in relation to, say, media freedom, democratic reform, or civil activism, so why are they are chary of doing so when the environment is at stake?

Smarter solutions and less soft politics are needed in today's China.

Private bicycles and a good public transport system, along with limited car use in city centers, is a more sustainable scenario for any modern city. Why China opted to become another New York or Mexico City is a mystery.

The slow disappearance of bicycles in China's cities is not the only example of this, nor even, perhaps, a terribly significant one. But the decline of bicycles in China's cities offers a readily recognizable symbol both of the breakdown of a system which might have been kept to ensure a more sustainable and secure future for China, and of a government obsessed with bad politics at the expense of good policy.

James Rose is editor of www.corporategovernance-asia.com